﻿Created by Matt﻿

You may have heard the term Internet of Things being thrown around lately. But what is it exactly? Techopedia.com defines The Internet of Things as “a computing concept that describes a future where everyday physical objects will be connected to the Internet and be able to identify themselves to other devices.” Basically all of the objects we use and interact with in our daily lives will be connected and sharing data with each other without any human interaction. Sidewalks, bottles of water, even your toilet will be chatting away 24/7 with everything else.

I already feel like the internet is all around us. At all times in all places you can see the internet’s presence and impact. But this will take it to an all new level. The amount of data being shared and used all around us will be incomprehensible. IBM put together a good 5 minute video that helps explain The Internet of Things. You can watch that here A rough example of what a day in the internet of things might look like… say you wake up and go to work in the morning and you realize you’re not feeling so well. Sensors in your body detect that you have a fever. In the invisible land of internet data, your calendar matches up with the doctor’s office and an appointment is created for you. Your car gets this information and realizes it doesn’t have enough gas to get you to the doctors so an unmanned mobile gas station comes to your work parking lot and fills up your tank. Half an hour before your appointment, a push notification is sent to your smart phone with all your healthcare information so you have it on hand. Meanwhile, at home your fridge is updating your grocery list letting you know you are low on milk, your favorite dress shirt is telling the washing machine it has a ketchup stain and your digital picture frames are hard at work removing all the pictures of your ex-girlfriend that you broke with the night before because it saw your status change on Facebook (or whatever social network will actually be relevant at the time) and on and on and on. The benefits are obvious and amazing. The convenience and time saving aspects alone are massive. Us humans wouldn't have to worry about those day to day tasks that eat away so much of our time. Meaning we could focus on more useful things like curing disease, protecting the environment and making better YouTube videos. But the risks are pretty daunting as well. Privacy is one concern which is a topic all to itself and is already a buzz in mainstream media. The risk of being hacked would go up drastically as well. Everyone knows you are only as strong as your weakest link and the same goes for cyber security. Maybe hackers wouldn't be able to get into your bank account by itself but if they can start by hacking into your microwave which is connected to everything else in the Internet of Things, they have a backdoor to all of your other information. Quinn Norton, a person much smarter than myself, wrote a great and terrifying article called Everything is Broken in which she describes the instability in current and future technology. She discusses how we jump into new technology as soon as we can rather than as soon as we should without actually knowing how it works or what risks might be involved. She says “Your average piece-of-shit Windows desktop is so complex that no one person on Earth really knows what all of it is doing, or how.” I am equally excited and terrified for what the future has in store for us. But thinking about it for too long makes my head hurt. So I’m going to shut my brain down for a while and watch some dude destroy his insides by eating the world’s hottest pepper on YouTube and play some mind numbing mobile games. Let me know what you think in the comments below or on Facebook

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